Optimism
by Midorino Mizu
Summary: Inui Sadaharu has some regrets.


Optimism  
  
Midorino Mizu  
  
Disclaimer: Tennis no Ohjisama and all associated characters are the property of Konomi Takeshi.  
  
Author's Notes: My Inui voice was strange today.  
  
Yanagi Renji had moved away from Tokyo just before they were to begin junior high, and it had disrupted all of Inui's plans.  
  
He and Renji, he'd always thought, would go to the same junior high school. They would join the same club, the tennis club. And they would always play doubles together. Always. But it hadn't worked out that way. His best friend's father had been transferred to Yokohama, forty minutes away from central Tokyo, and Renji had moved away.  
  
He hadn't said goodbye, Inui remembered. One day, he was just...gone.  
  
Inui knew where he was, of course. Even a school with a fading reputation, like Seigaku, heard the rumors about the long-time Kanto champions, Rikkai Dai Fuzoku. Even the freshman members of the Seigaku tennis club heard about the incredibly talented group of freshman at Rikkaidai. And Inui collected data, like other people collected shells and stuffed animals. He knew more than most. He knew about the frighteningly talented and determined Sanada Genichirou, the deceptively fragile Yukimura Seiichi, and the polite Yagyuu Hiroshi.  
  
But he knew the most about their intelligent data specialist. Yanagi Renji.   
  
Inui gathered Renji's data almost obsessively; he gathered it with more concentration and zeal than he had even devoted to Tezuka Kunimitsu. Tezuka might have been Seigaku's future, and one of the shining stars of junior high tennis. He might have been the only standard at Seishun Gakuen that Inui could measure himself against. But Renji was...Renji. His best friend for all of elementary school. The boy he had first played tennis with. The one who had taught him data tennis.  
  
Renji had been the first person he had never been able to defeat, so Inui had to know everything about him. He wouldn't accept anything less.  
  
Renji knew almost everything about him; he knew all the data. It was his job as Rikkaidai's formidable strategist to know everything about his opponents, and Inui imagined that Renji had more information on him than anyone else. They had been best friends, once. Wouldn't his friend have been as curious about him, as he had been about Renji?   
  
But sometimes, Inui wondered. Did Renji really know everything there was to know about Inui Sadaharu? Did Renji know about the painful mix of regret and pride he felt when he watched Kaidoh play with Momoshiro? Did he know that Inui always went to the same place, without fail, when he needed to think about something seriously? Did he know about the times when Inui had wondered if he had been too devoted to his data?  
  
Renji couldn't know about the times Inui had wondered if his single-minded devotion to his science had prevented him from being everything he could be, if it had simply isolated him, in the end.  
  
Renji simply couldn't know all those things. And Inui knew that he didn't know everything about Renji, either. He knew there were things about Renji that would always be a mystery to him. The little moments, he thought. They were the most important part, in the end; the small moments were the ones that changed people the most. Inui had missed every last one of those for three years, and Renji had missed every single one of the moments that might have changed him. Thousands of forgotten games of Monopoly, hundreds of impromptu sushi parties, tutoring Kikumaru in science every single term, just so he could pass. All those seemingly inconsequential things had been what had, in the end, changed him the most, and Renji had missed all of those things.   
  
They were different people now, Inui reflected as he stared across the court at his former best friend. They were almost strangers.   
  
He missed his best friend, he thought. He missed the people they used to be, and he knew he would never get those people back. They were just ghosts in his memory.  
  
But maybe, he thought, he could win this game. He could end this...this thing that had been a block between them for too many years now. And maybe then, they could move on, be friends again. Their first friendship was lost now - but maybe a second one was waiting for them.  
  
Inui tossed the tennis ball in the air and leaned back to serve. He could only believe in that, he thought. Just as he could only believe in his data, because for all the facts he had logged in his journals over the course of three years, in the end, he could only believe.  
  
Renji, he remembered, had always told him he was an optimist. 


End file.
